Abstract

This publication is an executive summary of the book, "World Population and Human Capital in the Twenty-First Century", which is the first book to systematically and quantitatively address the role of educational attainment in global population trends and models. By adding education to the traditional demographic characteristics of age and sex, this distinguishing feature substantially alters the way we look at changes in populations and how we project them into the future. In most societies, particularly during the process of demographic transition, women with more education have fewer children, both because they want fewer and because they find better ways to pursue their goals. And better educated men and women in virtually all societies have lower mortality rates and their children have a better chance of survival. The scenarios presented in this book show how alternative policies of education expansion in the near term, mostly through their effect on the future educational attainment of young women, can significantly influence the medium to long term paths of population growth for individual countries and the world as a whole.

The book also presents many other examples for how the future looks different - and mostly better - once education is explicitly factored into population projections. The pervasive demographic differentials by level of education matter greatly for population dynamics. When we explicitly address this important source of population heterogeneity, the projected future population trends are different from those resulting from the conventional stratifications that include only age and sex. In addition, the future educational attainment levels of the adult population are of great interest in their own right as a key determinant of outcomes ranging across economic growth, quality of governance, and adaptive capacity to environmental change, as summarized in the epilogue of the book.